Aminar

It's not a disorder, that implies its disruptive. On the other hand, Mistborn is Orange and Grey in color as according to my synesthesia.(music/concept to a shifting color pattern thing.) Thought you outta know since the topic came up.

I agree completely. That was something that started bugging me about three scenes from now. I hope I managed to make most of the book more difficult. That said I do feel Keth has done much more failing than succeeding so far.

I'm currently mid rewrite of this section. I'm wondering if I don't need a bit more transition here. Maybe a short clip from a doctors perspective of Iraisa first waking up on the ship and a meeting between The Grumr and Viv in her office. I had one of those a long time ago, but its lost to the bowels of file hell somewhere. I'm thinking maybe a total of three pages.

Its funny how much I agree with you. Part of the reasons this scene is due for a large rewrite. And I've made The Grumr's mental battle clearer earlier... But again, excellent points.

Good plan. Sorry my post is a little surly. It's been a long day. I really enjoyed the chapters... The dialogue and pacing are fantastic.

You have a then where you need a than. (Sorry, pet peeve.) The Father more graceful then the son. There's the occasional awkward sentence. We all have those, just watch out for them on editing runs. The big dramatic monologue feels awkward... It isn't a flaw to hold your spear looser in one hand. The stance you describe there is exactly what you are supposed to do. By keeping your left hand loose you allow it to act as a guide(like a pool cue) and extend your reach.(more of that I have experience with the weapon stuff.) As has been said, your fights are a bit dull. That first one. It amounts to They hopped around until he finally whacked her in the leg. Were I to write it, it would look like this(noting again that I have used both weapons.) The woman brought her halberd around, sweeping towards the man's legs. With surprising agility the spearman leapt over her swing, stabbing towards the halberdier's vulnerable right shoulder. She brought the heavy weapon's haft up, narrowly parrying the spear. The pair hacked and stabbed at each other, weapons clacking against eachother, sweat pouring down their faces. Finally the spearman scored a hit on the woman's exposed leg. The fight was done. She bowed and then limped away, shoulders slumped in defeat. I know it isn't an important fight, but it's early and no matter what you do, your first fight needs to create a good first impression. Several times through writing my scene I had to literally act out how I'd manage the swings. It showed me where each thing makes me vulnerable, which makes the fight seem more realistic and well thought out. The clinical nature is in your lack of description, not the blades. These blades grant immense skill, make the fighters awesome. Fights don't need to be long to be awesome. In truth the only time a fight takes more than 30 seconds in when the opponent has a giant shield that you just can't get past... (I hate shields.) Like any other aspect of writing, knowing about the material is important. You've said you don't know much about sword fighting yet. Try to get that experience. Find a Belegarth or Dagohir group nearby and go hit people with sticks. I promise it'll be fun eventually. This wiki has every Bel group in existence on it. http://geddon.org/California I bet one of these is close to you. Tell them you're a writer and looking for experience. Odds are they're an understanding lot.

I LOATHE that section. It's so hard to block out. I just rewrote the thing though. And it being his right hand is important... That's where his star is. Keth‘s hand felt warm and sticky, as if it had been transported somewhere different from the rest of his body. He tried to bring his hand out of the cloying humidity, but something was pulling his hand further and further into the heat. Whatever had his hand began to pull harder, his prone body slid across the smooth stone floor. What was pulling him? Why was his hand so warm? He couldn’t see. A roar louder than anything Keth had ever heard split the air, shattering the eerie silence. Moments later a huge scaly mass bumped into Keth’s right hand, shoving him back into the cool tunnel. The light playing across Keth’s eyelids suddenly disappeared. Something heavy hit the ground near Keth with a sickening wet thump. The scents of blood and carrion filled Keth’s nostrils, bringing on waves of nausea that ripped through his guts like a bullet. Dry heaves wracked Keth for several moments before he could draw himself together. He slowly stood; his whole body shaking from exhaustion and pain. Around Keth only silence and darkness seemed to exist. He slowly backed away and thought, ‘Dex, what in the Selcha’s Holy Wail just happened?’ Otherwise I agree. Although the emotions thing... Typically I tell the emotions because I'm in the characters perspective. They know(at the moment) what their emotions are. Showing the emotions is for outside perspectives. I know that's typically a first person perspective thing, but it feels better to me if I give the emotion some deeper perspective than just... His eyes widened or the He balled his fists. We know what those mean, but they don't convey the depth of emotion as well. Hence the frequent motions associated with emotions. (I just had this debate with myself. )

Well have at me. I feel like I might have lost direction here. In addition I'm cutting the invisibility scene for something else as I cut the ability to do that. It didn't fit. Oh and thanks for all the great advice. I've edited almost everything I've submitted so far now. The advice has been GREAT! The new stuff is a huge improvement.

I'd like to submit this week.

I just finished editing the very first thing I ever wrote for my novel. It's a bizarrely emotional thing.(That being for those who've read my stuff, the scene where Keth summons a spider and kills a raptor right up until the giant glowing splosion thing) I was really bad... I might resubmit the changes later.

The number of people liking my setting makes me smile. From there I plan on moving all chapters from The Grumr's perspective to his first name but then keeping the characters calling him Grumr or The Grumr based on context. When I started this my grasp on the setting wasn't very good. The infodumps were on the spot creation that do need a huge cutting down. My editing notes have about 2/3 of the thing highlighted for one reason or another. Same goes for repetition. I'm glad you guys noticed. I'll have to go over Iraisa's section, but from what I remember part of the magic in Keth's hand forced a mindmeld that allowed Iraisa to bypass alot of the cultureshock that would come from mingling such different cultures quickly. That isn't the point of my story and would have just slowed things down so I plot-mcguffined it away.(Although that Mcguffin is one of many hints towards a greater set of motivators) Same goes for Keth's learning of the language. Comes from the mindmeld. On perspective issues. I occasionally bust those. I know the rules, but I'm unwilling to let them restrict some knowledge. On Cursing. HELP! I suck at it for now. I've never been comfortable with it to the extent needed for The Grumr's surliness. And I'm off to Wasabi Con for the weekend. Stalk me at your own peril.

I do believe this was intentional. Hiding things like that in stories is one of my favorite things about writing.

Here we go. Please Enjoy. This was the start of me writing on a regular basis instead of sporadically. Aminar

I'd like to submit this time around if at all possible.

Thought is right. You have to treat writing like a job. What you don't do is treat it like an onus( I typed this word into the sentence, looked at it and wondered what the hell the it meant. But I got it right. Odd.). I look at writing as a profession. It takes skill and time to get good at. Admittedly I haven't worked a job I dislike in years. Last week I went over hours by a ton(Like 10 hours over) at my day job. I didn't notice. My boss asked if I felt like I worked too much. My answer was, "I worked that much. Oops." I also did some great writing last week, writing I did because I have a quota to fill. I need to manage my page a day, or my 600 words a day, or whatever I've set. It's not 40 hours a week, but I feel bad if I don't do it. I feel like I'm giving up or that I'll lose what I've gained. That's what treating writing like a job is. Making it an obligation, part of your life.

This could be me, but this doesn't feel like a prologue... I know it's set many years before your story. It just feels like it's focusing too much on development of this pair of characters without setting up much... While developing them sounds like it will happen sometime, by the time the real story comes around they should be entirely different people. Your writing is for the most part, superb. There's a couple small mistakes, but all things considered, very very good. I enjoy where you're going and I know you have cool things going on. You have well developed characters, but some of that development could be skipped. Were I to start this I would have started with just before they get to Relia, have a frantic hunt for her killer, and end with the suggestion of what could go wrong. In Late, out Early. What is "The Fire" It needs an explanation, even in the prologue. Nothing wrong, but a quick explanation right as it's first mentioned will make the concept more comfortable. (This comes from the perspective of a person with a great deal of sword fighting experience. I don't know how much you have, if any. Some of the way you write things, mentioning stances but giving no exact motions suggests you don't have much.) Your fight scene was... awkward. You describe the blades as if they are in control(Which they partially are) but it creates an image of the man not really in control of the sword. In addition I get this image of a man holding one arm way out to each side, swords moving in unnatural ways that would likely dislocate. It's because you have him using one sword per opponent. That doesn't work. Someone fighting florentine against a pair of opponents is never going to stop moving. It's swing block dance away, swing block, etc. There is no staying in one place in a fight with two swords or two opponents. It's fluid. The man's injured leg will be a huge issue for him, and makes the scene a little unrealistic. Not an inconvenience, but something that means the fight will end almost instantly. Especially with the length of Ganril's blade. That level of reach against an immobile opponent means the smartest way to handle the fight would be to just stand back and swing until the man's guard fails. Why put anyone else in danger when you can just sit there and rely on reach? The other person's only real job would be to stand just where with a long lunge they can take the twinblade in the back if he tries to rush the bigger swordsman. I would avoid the name Lan. It's too famous of a name in fantasy, even though it's more a nickname here. The name creates an image though, and it's tall, stony, and Malkieri. You have a then where you need a than. It popped out at me so I figured I'd bring it up. It's around the mention of the wooden coin. I know that your years are 600 days, but you say they're twenty turns old. Is that 300 days or 600?

Of course were still submitting. There's just a smaller number that want to be a little more active via dropbox.(Which makes a surprisingly handy chat client.)

Summonings costs are actually not the pain, that's because he pushed his mind way too hard. Summonings cost is in the acquisition (which you get to see) and the effects binding a bunch of things to your soul has(imagine having a wolverine tied to your soul. The temper issues you would have.) I need more dialogue throughout, it seems like all my characters talk aS little as they can... My chapter formatting gets better once I get a system(character 1, 2, and 3 in one and then 4 and 5 in the next. I have read Bartimaeus, damnation you for finding my hidden influences I hadn't processed yet... Bob is supposed to be the Bartimaeus series character and he's not even in this book.

Dex calls Keth Sir largely as a point of sarcasm(and because he's a soldier somewhere in there.) As for Power, I get to the costs later. For now I wanted to establish that magic is very very powerful(and it's costs reflect that, but they take quite a bit to get to). The Grumr spends quite a while without a soul worth speaking of as a side effect of his magic. I do use semicolons-More than any writer I've seen. It's a part of my own inherent thought process; how my mind structures things. Kind of a thought, counterthought/further explanation kind of thing. I have to work hard not to use more... (I can say that line and mean a semicolon instead of a period because the thought branches off from the other one. What it really needs is an elipses though. I'll change that.) I think part of the issue(and I believe I've said it before) is that I think much much faster than I type, which makes the process feel slow, which makes short sentences feel off... (I rephrased that sentence mentally three times while I typed it and I type at fortyfive or so words a minute.) I don't know if I ever clarify that the MIA thing is intentional. It's supposed to be camouflaged as a missing person's retrieval taskforce(Good grounds to be hunting down people who have changed their identities(as many summoners do)

Your writing is definitely smooth, especially the dialogue. There's something about your non-dialogue writing I find offputting. I think it's that almost all of you're sentences are around the same length unless they contradict themselves(Sentences with although or the like. I would look into smoothing out those sentences, but it might just be that my voice is close to opposite yours. My usual descriptive sentences tend toward the massive(Which is a word I need to use less...) Hmmm.... Your issues are all very much high-level though. Excellant job.

Well, here we have my next submission. As mentioned in the e-mail, my Chapter Blocking is all kinds of wonky. I plan on making a major edit of the beginning(up to around Chapter 5) so that I can manage some submissions, but that will start after I obtain some new tools in the coming weeks. For now, This needs work. Tell me where. The Full document can be found in Writing Group A's Dropbox. Lastly, was anybopdy at Convergance in the Twin Cities last weekend? Some of the Panel's were great.

Me too when I make a submission.

The dropbox thing is just that in a way though, it is Alpha readers but in a less formal way and frankly I tried getting a group of Alpha readers. It's hard because most of them are either A:Not good judges of literature or B: English Majors that look at a non-English Major writing and smugly assume they're better at it than me. Here I have people I trust to know what they are talking about. I don't expect them to read my stuff, but I know they have the option oif they are so inclined. And is it so wrong to have your writing group also have a section for Alpha reading. Personally I would say it's a brilliant way to run things.

The long Fiction still seems off. I mean, even if I get in 1 entry every three weeks on my book I'll still take 6 months to get a full read in and that isn't what I think were looking for. I get the feeling the desire is really to have somebody read the whole thing through and notice continuity errors, things that don't fit, and get a decent read on the plot-arc. Just having that option where somebody from the group can grab my whole book and say what they think on it is refreshing. I want somebody older than 16 to have read the whole thing so they can tell me where it gets stupid.

How would I find those channels on my tablet? I need the address...